Performance Art

“A put-on is not necessarily a put-down. I liken what I do
sometimes to a life game, as an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale
in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually. The audience gets
involved and has to decide for itself what’s going on and what’s
to be learned from the experience. Everybody is a participant.”

Dramatists occasionally
play
with the audience / performer boundary, and social psychologists have
adopted this form of performance art as a professional technique, renaming
the performances
breaching experiments.

In one example, Jim Moran went to a cocktail party, dressed for the occasion
except for one anomalous accessory: a small length of string looped around
his ear and extending into one corner of his mouth. Moran didn’t
explain the string to anyone. He didn’t even mention it… and
nobody else did either! And thusly the
Somebody Else’s Problem Field
was discovered.

Mobbing
is a form of semi-anonymous, quasi-spontaneous, collective performance art
that’s starting to take hold. It’s “an e-mail-driven
experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly materialize in
public places, interact with others according to a loose script and then
dissipate just as suddenly as they appeared.”

The
Surveillance Camera Players
arrange dramatic performances intended for viewing on surveillance cameras,
then find examples of these cameras in their surroundings and put on
interpretations of Ubu Roi and Waiting for Godot
for the lucky security guards or video cassette recorders monitoring the
scene.

In ShootingBack, I confront representatives of the
“Surveillance Superhighway” (establishments
such as department stores where video surveillance is used extensively, yet
photography by customers is strictly prohibited). I begin with my camcorder
held down at my side, pointing away from a representative of the
SS. Then, I ask the representative “What
are those mysterious ceiling domes — those dark
hemispheres…” or “Is that a video
camera? Why are you taking pictures of me without my
permission?” After the representative tells me that I am
paranoid and that only criminals are concerned about cameras, I raise the
camcorder up to my eye… At this point, the representative of
the SS often shows great
concern about my camcorder, and thus, in a 180 degree reversal, is
self-incriminating.

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images
with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be
descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as
it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras
with balloons, lasers and infrared devices.

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that
uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of
people whose images are recorded.

Andrew Epstein of Amhurst College in Massachusetts
created a commentary
on the U.S. War on Drugs by taking
it to its logical conclusion. He posted
signs that read “In order to curb the use of caffeine at
Amherst College, the sale and distribution of coffee are no longer permitted
on campus. Effective Immediately.” Then he shut down and
cloaked the old coffee machines and sent out confederates to peddle coffee
beans out on the sidewalk black market.

The best part of this is that it was all done above-board with the approval
of the campus administration under the guise of an art project.
“I suspect if he had come to the administration as an
activist, there would have been much stronger resistance,”
said Epstein’s faculty advisor. “It shows us how art has
this kind of peculiar permission.”

A 17-year-old girl stopped Governor George Wallace from speaking at the
Georgia State House
by applauding him!

Won’t go any further without a tip of the hat to Orson Welles’ radio show
The War of the Worlds
which gripped the U.S. in
media-hypnotized panic in 1938.

“The biggest reason I do the hoax medium is because
everyone is so post-ironic today,” says
Mike Z
of Crowded Theater.
“No one believes in anything. The willing suspension of
disbelief is long gone. People have disbelief every moment of their waking
hours. So I do try to craft my work so that it’s considered important
information and not a goof. I think too much of our culture has been
abandoned to goofing on truth and meaning. I want to address issues, and I
think the best way to do that is to be taken seriously.”

The architectural activist group
Heavy Trash
built and installed
viewing platforms
that people can climb if they want to look inside gated communities to see
how the upper crust lives.

Susan Griffen tells a story about surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was
imprisoned in the Nazi death camps:

One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly a Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.

Jeffrey Vallance bought a Foster Farms chicken at the supermarket, then
took it to a pet cemetery and — maintaining a straight face — asked for
the whole shebang memorial service and burial for his beloved pet
Blinky.

A woman going by the name
Terrifica
puts on mask and cape and patrols New York City, looking for drunk women
in bars who are in danger of being picked up on by dastardly men, and
coming to their rescue.

A San Diegan who calls himself “Monte” has
distributed
pictures of himself
dancing on Ronald Reagan’s grave and urinating on Richard Nixon’s.

One of the techniques used by the Nazi invaders of Poland to stamp out
resistance was to demolish statues and monuments dedicated to Polish
patriotism or heroes. Many Poles adopted the practice of pretending that
the monuments still existed, for instance walking around the empty spaces
where they had been as if they were still there.

Three men were arrested for
throwing paper airplanes
through the airspace of the U.S.
embassy in Norway, while the U.S.
was bombing Afghanistan.

Lorin Partridge
shows up at anti-war protests with pro-war picket signs that read
“War is Groovy” and
“Killing People is No Big Deal.”

When four women decided to do a spoof of women’s lib protests in
1970, carrying signs reading “Ban the Man” and “Down
with Men and Marriage” they didn’t know that a photo of their
tongue-in-cheek protest would become
an icon of feminist militancy.

“Olympia,” dressed in business attire and
carrying a briefcase, abruptly
went into an hour-long pole dance
on the sidewalk of San Francisco’s financial district during the Christmas
shopping rush.

He entertains his passengers with jokes, stories and spontaneous poems in
the bus, which he’s decorated with smiley faces. He hides candies and
snacks under the bus seats on special occasions, and he has a cache of
stuffed animals for crying kids. He leads sing-a-longs featuring bus and
work-themed songs: “If You’re Happy That It’s Friday, Say
Uh-huh” and “Ride, Ride, Ride the Bus
Gently Down the Street.”

Gilbert Highet writes: “It is in the realm of art, the
only realm which combines the sublime and the ridculous, that the hoax
belongs. When Horace de Vere Cole
strewed horse droppings (procured with considerable difficulty
and expense from mainland Italy) about the center of that horseless city,
Venice, and then watched the Venetians gazing with a wild surmise first
at the pavement of the Piazza di San Marco
and then at the sky above, where nothing has yet been seen to fly but
pigeons and airplanes, he was enjoying the purest pleasure of
art…”

In San Francisco, California, a man by the name of
Brian Anthony Young
impersonated a state fish and game warden for three months, checking
licenses, issuing citations and confiscating fish. He said that
“boredom and drugs” led him to perform the
inspections on more than 200 anglers, boats, restaurants and stores.

Speaking of fish and game in San Francisco, the S.F. Cacophony Society
recently organized a
pigeon roast
downtown.

Brian G. Hughes struck it rich in
the paper box and banking biz and decided to spend his cash and leisure
time messing with people and their attitudes toward conspicuous displays
of wealth: entering alley cats in cat shows (and winning!), dropping
packages of glass jewels in front of Tiffany’s, that sort of thing.

In March 1999 a group of people on social welfare visited Bloemendaal, the
richest town in the Netherlands. They brought gifts such as home baked
cakes or flower bulbs and offered them to the rich. An accompanying note
said “You pay a lot of taxes, which we profit from. With
this gesture we would like to express our thanks.”

Here’s a good story: A student at MIT spent her summer
days at the Harvard football field, wearing a black-and-white striped shirt
and tossing bird seed around while blowing a whistle. A few months later,
football season began, and when the referee blew the whistle for the first
home game, the field was suddenly covered with birds.

In 1987, a teenager from West Germany flew a small, single-engine Cessna
450 miles through Soviet airspace and landed in Red Square in
Moscow. The reds threw
Mathias Rust
in prison, but Gorbachev let him out soon after — and Gorby took advantage
of the incident to can his defense minister and purge the military command,
hastening the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Five stars to a Mr. Lozier, who conceived of a
brilliant hack
in the early 1800s. He managed to convince a sizable crowd of New
Yorkers that Manhattan was in imminent danger of sinking under the
weight of sprawling construction. After a few days, Lozier came up with
the plan of cutting the island loose, towing it out into the Atlantic,
turning it around and reättaching it to the mainland. He enlisted
(I’m not kidding, folks) hundreds of people in this wacky
scheme.

Jane White was sick of more than a decade of monthly visits from
pamphleteering Jehovah’s Witnesses. Finally, she snapped.
At ten in the morning on Sunday, she banged on the door of the Kingdom Hall
where the sect was having its services, then invited herself in and started
offering magazines to the congregation.

P.T.
Barnum
was ever-creative in his use of ritual performance to manipulate behavior
and belief. And points for tummult go to
The Rensselaer Drop Squad
for relentless dropping of big heavy things down tall staircases.

A group of students in Georgia threw a rave and a fashion show
in a Wal-Mart.
“We just wanted something we could do at Wal-Mart to bring
the youth culture and the art world into kinda like a fluorescent-lit
wasteland.”

The
Solid Gold Chart Busters
have taken on guerrilla cell phone destruction as a hobby. View movie clips
of their work on-line — they promise that “[a]ll the people
concerned are real members of the public and no one was refunded for the
loss of their mobile telephone.”

Talk radio call-in shows are targeted by the performance artist-pranksters
Goy Division, and football star-turned-actor
O.J. Simpson targeted both
the legal system
and U.S. racial politics in his brilliant yet deadly satire,
The O.J. Simpson Trial.

Gabriele Paolini
has made a name for himself by jumping out behind TV
reporters as they are delivering live, on-the-scene broadcasts — usually
waving condoms or a photo of the pope. There’s some sort of implicit
activist message in here somewhere, but I’ve chosen to put this report here
rather than in our Guerrilla Hacks
section. This because he’s managed to get himself on TV
more than 18,000 times. Good grief!

A hunter in Uganda was being sought by authorities upset over his
habit
of shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and then dressing them in clown suits.

Pete Wagner (inspired by Brother
Jed) likes political demonstrations so much that he decided it was no
use waiting for an appropriate issue to come around. He started holding
Generic Demonstrations
at which any ol’ issue would be fair game and people would hold up
placards reading merely “For” and “Against.”

Wagner also joined in with some friends to liven up a feminist “Take
Back the Night” anti-rape march — by forming a all-male
cheerleading squad to line the parade route and cheer on the marchers.

Another group of pranksters parodied the followers of American perennial
presidential candidate and lunatic Lyndon LaRouche by
donning tinfoil hats
and loudly proclaiming a number of loosely-connected insane notions in
the public square. “One was waving a sign that said ‘Build an
escalator to mars’; another sign bore the sentence, ‘Dick
Cheney is a salamander.’”

Last night, I attended a renegade party buried in San Francisco. We could
see the road from our location, but the road could not see us. When we saw
cop car after cop car drive by, we knew it was over. But still, as they
stopped, we crouched down, climbed trees, hid behind bushes. The officer
climbed the hill with his flashlight, shining it on people. He got to the
top where he realized there were at least 150 people there.

“Oh. My. God.” was the only thing he could
mutter. And he kept repeating it.

In response, someone jumped up and yelled
“Surprise!” at which point everyone jumped
into singing “Happy Birthday” to the
officer. His eyes were wide with shock, jaw still slack…

Apparently, in Virginia, all you gotta do to get a new driver’s
license photo is go to the department of motor vehicles and ask. So a
couple of pranksters drove from one to the next, getting their photos
taken at one after another, wearing ridiculous clothes, wigs, fake beards,
and mugging for the camera with grotesque expressions. Oh yeah,
then they made a movie about it.

A woman in Melbourne, Australia has gotten in the habit of commandeering
the public address system on the subway to
make smutty announcements.

People who transform their whole lives into performance art get special
treatment in our Fake Folks and
Impostors pages, but I’ll
highlight a handful here as well:

First and foremost was a fellow who called himself
George Psalmanazar
(his real name is lost to history). In the late 17th
Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to be a cannibal prince
from the exotic orient. He made up
an alphabet
and lectured widely about the pagan
practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford
on the subject. In 1704 he compiled these observations into the book
“An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa.”

When
Psalmanazar
died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the
decades-old hoax, were published. His life was revealed to have been one
long work of amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.

How could he have pulled off such a complete ethnic imposture on the likes
of Oxford? Well, don’t say it is because people were stupid back in the
eighteenth century. In the twentieth century,
Grey Owl,
an Englishman who impersonated a native American for years, wrote
autobiographical books, lectured, and even visited the British royal family
to tell them stories about his life. His influential books are credited
with starting the conservation movement in Canada. He wasn’t found out
until shortly after his death in 1938.

One of my favorite performance artists was a San Franciscan named
Joshua A. Norton
who, in 1859, declared himself to be Emperor of the United States (and
Protector of Mexico). The Emperor’s visionary proclamations
were printed up in the papers, his self-issued currency
was often honored, he corresponded with other heads of state, and his
renown was such that tens of thousands of people turned out at his funeral.

Lord Buckley,
poet, performance artist, and hep cat, gets big points for spirit and
inspiration, as does his fellow blue-blood Lady Hester Stanhope,
the “Queen of the East.”